Bart Everett is a veteran newspaper journalist and photographer who has worked for the Los Angeles Times, the Kansas City Star and the International Herald Tribune in Paris. He grew up as an “airline brat,” traveling with his family—and later alone—around the world. He acquired his first camera, a Kodak Duoflex, when he was about eight years old, later borrowed his father’s Leica—which he subsequently lost in Nepal—and then moved on to Speed Graphic press cameras.

He earned his first money in photography as a high school sports photographer selling freelance work to the Kansas City Star. As a student at Kansas State University, he was a photographer for the student newspaper, the daily Collegian, where he later served as editor. When the People to People program was launched, he joined the staff and was recruited by the Carl Byoir agency to photograph and write about student ambassadors in Europe. In the U.S. Army at Ft. Sill, Oklahoma, he worked in the Public Information Office and often shot motion picture film for a television station in Lawton, Oklahoma. After leaving the Army he became editor of Grass & Grain, a mid-Kansas farm weekly, where he was also the sole photographer.

As a reporter at the Kansas City Star, he was often assigned to the Saturday night police beat. Instead of covering the beat from the police station as was customary, he roamed the city in a car equipped with police radios and a press camera, offering his editors both words and pictures.

As an editor at the Los Angeles Times, he often provided feature photographs shot on his off hours and occasionally was in a position to bring in spot news photographs, as was the case when the oil tanker Sansinena exploded in the Los Angeles Harbor.

Since the early 1970s he has worked almost exclusively with 35-millimeter film and digital cameras. After leaving the Times in 2004 he concentrated on landscapes and fine art photography. His work now is represented by 10 international stock agencies, which market digital files on the Internet.

His photography and writing has been published in newspapers and magazines as well as on the Internet. He lives in Los Angeles with his family but continues to travel widely.

Artist's Statement and Description of Work

Nature and landscape are compelling themes for photography, and they have been among my passions since childhood. I became fascinated by light and how it could change the appearance of people and objects. Though I use artificial lights and strobes when necessary, I developed much more interest in subjects that lend themselves to natural illumination. Thus, my work encompasses not only landscapes and other “nature” subjects, but also people in natural, often candid, circumstances.

Almost all of my work now involves color images, but I honed processing and printing skills on monochromes in a chemical darkroom. Dodging and burning on enlarged images was standard practice in the traditional darkroom, though these techniques were difficult to apply to color printing in such an environment. Today, skills learned in the traditional darkroom are easily applied to digital processing and printing of both color and monochrome images. Because these digital tools are so much more versatile and powerful than the traditional methods, I now digitize earlier film captures for current processing and printing.

In the 1990s I resumed a serious interest in nature and landscape work, traveling often to the Eastern Sierra and Owens Valley. The emptiness of those lands is alluring, and their simple beauty is often ignored by those passing through too quickly. In these photographs I sought to capture the history suggested by the lone trees and old irrigation byways. I wanted the images to have a surrealistic edge, an emotional tug. Later, I carried this approach to other areas in California, then to Hawaii, New York, Kansas and other locales.

Today, though techniques and equipment have evolved, I continue to strive for a visceral dimension in every image, to convey the energy or serenity—or whatever—that lies beneath the visual. I seek the charm and depth often overlooked in our surroundings, be they majestic vistas, roadside flora or simply the people we share our lives with.

Aside from digitizing earlier film images, all of my current work is produced digitally using Canon professional cameras and lenses. Images are captured in raw format, converted to Adobe RGB (1998), and individually processed before printing. Inks, papers and other materials associated with the final print are all of archival quality. --Bart Everett